Capstone Reflection (and Capstone Essay & Script)

Have you ever done a big research project at school? I did. It’s called Capstone, and the process was very hard, especially for me because I did it about the Chinese Exclusion Act. First, we had to do lots and lots and lots of research. Then, we had to write an essay based on a main inquiry question about our topic and after that, we had to cut our essay so much to fit it in our script (I had to cut a lot -I had too much background information building up to the Chinese Exclusion Act). After we finished the script, we were allowed to start our video. That was also challenging since we had to use Creative Commons images but there weren’t a lot of Creative Commons pictures of the Chinese Exclusion Act that I wanted to use or wasn’t useful at all so I ended up “stealing” a lot of photos. The final product was worth it, though. I also used Canva to make a brochure for my video and I think it turned out great.

At first, Capstone research was really hard for me since there aren’t a lot of kid-friendly resources with lots of information and the only one with plenty of information was the National Archive and some of the words I couldn’t understand. Like, there was this one word I didn’t know and I thought the Page Act was worse and the Geary Act was really good. Finally, I discovered a book called Exclusion and the Chinese American Story and it was amazing for me. Sadly, I didn’t have much time to research after I got the book so I didn’t read the entire thing (I skipped some not-so necessary things) and I didn’t add details but I worried I would need the details so I used these paper post-it tab thingies that were stuck to my Heathcote notebook I got at the book fair and put them where I left out some details so I could come back to them when writing my essay. After writing all my notes down, it was time to start my essay. 

In my Capstone Essay, I answered the question, In what ways were the Chinese people impacted by the Chinese Exclusion Act. From all of my research, I can tell that Chinese people were upset but they didn’t stop trying to come to the US. I really liked writing my essay because I was putting all of my research into one and I really liked that I got a lot of research so my essay was long and had lots of interesting background information that built up to the Chinese Exclusion Act. What was challenging was also the fact that I had a lot of information. Sure, a lot of information was good since then it would have a lot of facts and be interesting. But, it took a long time to write my essay. I had to go back to my Capstone notebook to look at a note and then write it down on my chromebook then change it a little bit so it made sense in the sentence and didn’t read like “Horace Page came up with the Chinese Exclusion Act, President Chester A. Arthur signed it into law” and was changed into “Horace Page didn’t think that the Page Act was enough, so he created the Chinese Exclusion Act, which President Chester A. Arthur signed into law on May 6, 1882”. I had so much information and we only had 5 days to complete the essay, at school and at home, so I worked on it a lot (and didn’t practice my entire two hours of violin, which was a shame). In the end, my Capstone Essay was 3292 words which is about 658 words on average per day. Here’s my essay down here:

Capstone Essay

For my Capstone project, I chose a WeVideo instead of a Ted Talk because I probably couldn’t remember anything from my script. Since my essay was so long, I had to cut so much of my essay to fit it in the script and keep it under six minutes. I was devastated when I cut out all the parts I found really interesting, like Afong Moy or Anna May Wong. I had no idea what to cut so Mrs. Furgatch helped me a lot. I got 3292 words cut to 969 words. When inserting my script into the boxes, I would lose track of where I copied and pasted, so I highlighted where I had already pasted that section into a box thingy. The script took a long time to finish and I was exhausted when I inserted the last sentence. All that work was worth it, though.

WeVideo Script Template – Capstone Jennie

After the script, it was time to start the WeVideo! Since my topic is the Chinese Exclusion Act, it was frustratingly hard to search for Creative Commons photos (as I mentioned earlier). I’m glad I’m still a kid since I’m still technically stealing a photo but the people who made/own the photo can’t sue me. I tried finding photos for a box that wasn’t a Chinese Exclusion Act photo. For example, when I described Chinese people staying in America, I didn’t search “Chinese people in America during the Chinese Exclusion Act”. Instead, I searched on WeVideo, “America” and I chose one since, hey, I was still talking about the US. That helped a lot with the Creative Commons thingy. One of the problems was when I was talking about a specific person, they had few/none photos of that person. For example, when I searched for Hui Shen there were people named Hui Shen, just not the Hui Shen I was looking for. At first, I thought one guy was Hui Shen and tried to find Wikipedia’s source, but then I read what Wikipedia said and realized that was not the Hui Shen I was looking for (there’s no images of him anywhere because most scholars don’t believe he is real). Instead, I just put text, reading “Hui Shen”. A lot of my photos are way longer than six seconds, since, as I said, I had pretty much no photos. I animated some of them as best as I could, especially all the ones with only text. It was really hard for me to record my voice over since there were a lot of sounds every once in a while and sometimes I made mistakes since I was so nervous. Once, I recorded more than half of it and took a small break, but I didn’t press the button to save the recording, which was really annoying but somehow, I managed to record the thing right before the WeVideo due date. I had NO IDEA what to put for my music so I just typed in “Chinese music” because why not and I used the track Lotus Pond because it sounded pretty good and it was so short that I used it a bit more than four times. Making the video was pretty fun, it’s just really tiring and for me, requires a lot of stealing which I do NOT like. 

Overall, there were many challenging bits when doing Capstone but it’s pretty fun. What do you think of Capstone? Would you pick Ted Talk or WeVideo, and what would your topic be?

My video:

My Canva brochure:

Creating the Immigration Video Reflection

You are creating a video. A video about what? Immigration. You place it in the last photo. YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You just need to record and place some music in your video now, and you’re all set! That’s how I made the video of my interviewee Steve who immigrated from Greece.

It was really fun making the video. It was kind of annoying though, because I had to adjust the time to all the photos and even finding the photos was hard! Let’s just say that WeVideo doesn’t have a lot of the photos I need. I also spent so much time we had to do before the video – the script with time blocks. Let’s just say, I ended up ignoring the time blocks. Finally, FINALLY, after the photos of the video, we did recording. When I went home, I recorded. Buuut, it didn’t make a peep. I made sure that I was recording it with full volume on so it was kinda strange. I remembered when I did a podcast with my friends (which was a very, very big coincidence since Mrs. Cooper picked the partnerships), this also happened when we tried to record with my chromebook. So, Mr. Mitchell came down into the wing and we figured out the problem. But the day before that was Eid so we didn’t have school and that day (which is the day I’m writing this blog post) is the day that the video project is due. Long story short, basically my video was completed one day after the due date (I don’t think that the teachers will be okay with it if I was in middle school so I am lucky). After I recorded, I put in some music and tried to do the credit but I didn’t have the links so I just named the photos that needed to be credited. I liked this project a lot!

What I learned about immigration from Steve: It is terrible if you move and you live there forever. I don’t count as an immigrant or a US citizen, I’m only staying here for seven years total for now but I DO know that leaving your family behind for only like a year is painful. I sure do hope that Steve visited them every year from then.

So, basically, doing this immigration project is long but fun. Do you know anyone that immigrated to the US?

Immigration Interview Reflection

You are in school. You are desperately trying to think of questions for your interview. You are finally done with your questions. But then, your teacher left some comments on the docs, asking you to change some things around. Ugh, MORE work? Seriously? But when your interview comes, you feel like all that is worth it for these questions. That is how I felt when I went through the process of doing my interview.

I had to think for some time what my questions could be. Mrs. Cooper had a doc with questions that we could ask. It helped me a lot. A lot LOT. After I typed the questions I had made up and copy and pasted from the doc, I put them in chronological order, like we were supposed to. Mrs. Cooper checked it and I didn’t know until the next time I saw my questions. I changed them and changed some more with the new comments. I was so relieved when everything was done because I was so tired! Little did I know we were doing a video until Mr. Casal and Mrs. Cooper told us and I was thinking, here we go again with all that writing and planning and… you get the point. I actually like the project but it gets tiring sometimes when you don’t know what question you are going to ask and think about for a couple hundred million times. I know it doesn’t sound THAT tiring, but for me it is.

I was going to conduct my interview in a restaurant and it was very noisy so it wasn’t the best choice but oh well. I was asking questions here and there and I thought my interviewee, Steve, was thinking “When is the food going to come?” Steve’s answers were pretty wise, in my opinion. I couldn’t really hear him at times but he repeated so the interview was ok. I haven’t got the photos yet since my dad is really busy. Steve said the questions were very smart but I got some questions from the doc so… The most silly question in the pile is “What’s your new favorite food?” that I got in the doc but when I saw it, I just thought, “Why not?

In conclusion, the interview questions are boring! Yeah right (sarcastic), they were NOT boring. BUT they were sorta maybe sometimes tiring. Overall, the interview was great, just make sure to get enough sleep. Why do I keep on talking about tiring? Ugh. So, if you do an interview, I am sure you will like the project. Do you know anyone that has immigrated anywhere?

Ready. Set. CURL!!!

You put the slider under your foot and start to push the stone back. You push the stone, let go, 

and the sweepers start to sweep the ice. It goes into the house, and your team cheers. You just scored a point in curling. I will be writing a reflection about when my class went on a field trip to Ardsley Curling Club. I will be writing about delivering the stone in my first paragraph, and sweeping in the second. I had a good time there but there were also challenges. For example, both of our teams couldn’t get the stone into the house until my team FINALLY got one, and then another but there were no more points afterwards. I think that curling is really fun if you follow instructions so you won’t hit your head since THAT is definitely no fun at all.

 

To deliver the stone, we practiced at school. There were these stones on wheels and there was a miniature house in the gym. We would practice like that and it was very easy, but it got harder when we did it on the ice. A lot harder. A lot lot harder. A lot lot lot harder. Ok, I’ll stop rambling, let’s continue. We had to use the stabilizer and I still fell but after a while, I got the hang of it. You had to sort of lunge/kneel when you were delivering it, while you had a slider underneath the foot opposite of your dominant hand, so if you are a righty, you put under your left foot, and if you were a lefty- basically you get the idea. You held the stabilizer in your non-dominant hand and the stone in your dominant hand. You put your other foot on a thingamabob and push your stone and foot with the slider backward, then forward and then slide on the ice. Wait! This is important. You might be thinking you can let go whenever you want but nope! If you let go too early or late, you will fall and the stone won’t go as far. It is very important so that you can get the stone into the house. When I fell a few times, I thought, Am I the next Sophie Foster? Sophie Foster is a character in my favorite book series, Keeper of the Lost Cities, who trips A LOT. A LOT LOT. A LOT LOT LOT. Ok, ok, I promise I’ll stop rambling in this whole reflection then. At once, when I tripped, my knees felt frozen though they weren’t, don’t worry. What a way to hurt my leg I thought.

 

Sweeping is a very important part in curling. No, you don’t take the bus back home and sweep the floor of your room so you can win in curling, though your parents will be happy and mad. Why? Your floor will be clean but your parents will be like “What the heck are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be at school?” When you sweep, you rub the broom on the ice, causing friction and the ice to be a little more slippery so the stone can slide on the ice farther. You can sweep a lot but don’t over sweep it! If you over sweep it, it can go out of the house, so maybe stop sweeping like a third meter away from the house? When we were waiting for the other class to finish, there was this really good shot but then people over swept it and I was thinking, Well, THAT is just so sad. Anyways, you might be thinking, if the ice is sweeped so many times by so many people, why doesn’t the ice melt? Well, you’re only causing friction to make VERY slightly slippery. It’s also cold there so it will turn cold again eventually, think of it as an ice skating rink, why didn’t the ice melt from all the friction with all the ice skating shoes? You also might be wondering, how come you don’t slip? Well, if you were running, especially with a slider, you would trip a lot. The thing is, the ice isn’t flat so there are bumps on the ice so you don’t trip as much and the stone can still slide. How the slider works is if your shoes are a little flat at the bottom, it will slide because, well, it is flat and can slide around the ice! This is why we have sliders, so we can slide more to deliver the stone farther. There is also more to curling that is kind of important to win for example, the hammer which is having the last shot so you can knock the other team’s stone away or knock your own into the house if it’s a little close to the house but not in yet.

 

This is why I think curling is fun, since you get to slide on the ice and score points when you get it in the house. It is also about good sportsmanship like every sport does. Before the game, you say good curling to the other team, when someone makes a good shot in the house, you say good shot, and when the game is over, you fist bump the other team and say good game. Not everything is about being competitive, it’s about having fun with everyone. What do YOU think about curling?

Feature Article Reflection

Have you ever written an article? If you haven’t, it is very fun but complicated. Okay, I’ll take that back. VERY complicated. I wrote an article about how to find books you will like reading by level and which stories you like. Read more to find out the process of making an article.

The first few parts are writing, writing, and writing some more. Everyone needs a topic because, if there are no topics, what would even write about? To pick the topics, it needs to be something you know about because here, we are doing this for writing, not research, BUT if you need a fun fact, you can do a quick research for some (I don’t have a fun fact though). My topic is books because I love to read books. After drafting everything, you need to revise and come up with a title, subtitle, and before the writing (I forgot to  mention), the name of each section. After all that, You need to revise A LOT. It’s because of if it makes sense, spelling, and if there is a big gap or something because that is important when you start to format. When you are pretty much done, you could go format.

For formatting, I think I took more time than writing. For formatting, you need to play around with shapes very much. Our formatting part is on new slides because we were using shapes and it will be WAY easier. The reason we’re using shapes is because if you use a text box, when the text box is full, it makes the text smaller than it is supposed to. After you decide how you are arranging the shapes, you have to copy and paste the text into the shapes. The shapes have to be either square or rectangle. When you like your formatting with the text so far, you get to find images! BUT you can only search from creative comments or then you are basically stealing an image. If you can find no images about your topic, you find it the normal way but you have to type “search for:____” and then “Website:____” and then what you searched for after the search on top to replace the blank space after “search for”, copy and paste the website where the image came form and paste it where it has a blank space after “website” and write them in the captions. The normal text has to have one size, all the names of topics and subtitles should be one size, the title is one size, the captions is one size, and the text feature text size is one size. I know it is confusing but it is not impossible for sure. After all that, you need to revise, revise, and revise MUCH MORE (just in case!). When you finish revising, read to double check if it makes sense. IF you are completely sure, give it to a teacher to check! Though it was really hard, everyone finished their articles!

In conclusion, writing an article isn’t typing a bunch of words, adding pictures, and printing it. It is so much more than that, it is writing important information, formatting the article to look good, and adding images that match the information given in the article. So if you write an article about something, think about all the important things you need to add to your article!

Happy Halloween!

BOO! You wake up and see a monster on your bed! Whew! It’s just a nightmare! But then you remember today is Halloween and you jump out of bed. You rush to get your costume and put it on then go out the door to school where they will have the Halloween Parade. You think about all the candy you will get this evening! This blog post will be about what happened to me at Halloween this year.

At school we had a Halloween Parade. You put on our costumes in school then you parade down the front circle, showing off your costume. The parents that came to the front circle of the school are supposed to watch you and take pictures of you. Also, in 5th grade, the whole entire grade and class takes a picture of kids wearing their Halloween costumes for the yearbook. It was very cold when we took the picture because the water on the grass in my shoes I thought. After the parade, some people went to change into their regular clothes because either they wanted to or it was hard to do regular things like sit or something but I didn’t have any. Since we were in 5th grade, we also had a Halloween Party at the school by the PTA! It was the Friday before Halloween. There were three prizes : Jordyn got best homemade, Dowlat got scariest, and Andrew got best one. The prizes were Scoop Shop gift cards. There was also a DJ and a person that made us dance something and a girl versus boys dance competition. They handed out A LOT free stuff that was either glow-in-the-dark or had lights in them. There were even games in the gym like guess how much candy was in the jar. There was a giant, inflatable black cat at the entrance that would turn its head once a while that I liked. After school, I went trick or treating. I went trick or treating on Halloween like everyone else (since that is the main thing of Halloween) with my sister and my friends Abby and Zoe. When I went back home, I got A LOT and not a lot of candy I tried MANY, MANY new kinds of candy that I have never tasted since my mom is a ginormous health nut and I used to live in Turkey (no joke) which doesn’t have that much American candy and you don’t trick or treat there. We went from 5:45 PM to 6:45 PM. My sister, as usual, was very loud and annoying and took a handful of candy in every bucket even though there was a note that said take two. Abby’s doctor, Dr. Kesler (like a character in my book Keeper of the Lost Cities except Kesler owns Slurps and Burps, an elixir shop) gave us HUGE candy like how Abby got a whole entire Hershey chocolate bar!

So, I loved Halloween. Suddenly, I wonder what spooky things you did with your friends and family (and how much candy you got!).

Bedford Ropes Course Reflection

Have you ever gone to a ropes course before? If you haven’t yet, and you like teamwork and fun, you should try it if you can. It is so fun and challenging and you need teamwork to solve some of them. You also learn new strategies every time you try again when you fall off or do it wrong.  Today, I will write about my experience at the Bedford Ropes Course and what happened and what we learned when doing it.

I’m going to talk about my three favorite challenges at the ropes course. My first favorite was the Indiana Jones Challenge but it was really challenging and you REALLY needed a good strategy like when you get on the thin beam, scoot on it with your butt and not walk on it in case you fell from losing your balance.The goal was to go around the whole entire thing and ask your teammates that had gone through for tips on how you do it. You also needed to be careful about where you were stepping because if you stepped somewhere that was in thin air and not the beam then BOOM! You would fall down to the ground. You definitely need to keep your balance or else you will fall flat on your feet or if you were getting on to something like a beam, you fall and hurt yourself pretty badly (I kind of did). You need to do it slowly in order to steady yourself and keep in balance, remember, patience is key. (The thing is though I only got to the beams because I fell at the last beam so I only got through that so if you ever go there, good luck on the other parts!) We tried to ask the people that had gone through the beams if they could tell us how they did it but they were focusing on the wire part and they couldn’t here us from where they were.  My second favorite is the Rope Bridge Challenge, the goal is that we really need to be patient on this one because we were not allowed to accidentally touch other people or the ground because then we would be out and would have to start all over again, so we needed to bend over and walk over the people that were bending their bodies and we had to do it slowly. The goal was to go touch the tree on the other team’s side and the other team were trying to touch our tree (there was no winning or losing thing, it was just teamwork with the whole team but we had to split into two groups). You had to be careful and communicate like saying “Can you bend over?” or “I will bend over” and similar things. You also really need to be patient so that you don’t accidentally run into someone or do something too fast so that you could still stay on and not be out. My third favorite is the Mohawk Walk. The goal was to get your group to a black square by walking on wires that was securely connected on to trees. At first, my group butt scooted (scooting on their butt) since we couldn’t balance on the wires but then one of us came up with this idea of while walking on the wires, we could hold hands and the person near the tree, clinging on to the dear life of EVERYBODY, to balance ourselves, but that didn’t exactly go as we planned, because after all people were on the tree, we were stuck there so people kept shouting “Help!” and “Scoot slowly!” and “But I can’t!” and things like that. So we just continued to butt scoot. The only problem (well, two actually) was it was SO painful that people started saying ouch while butt scooting. Another was flipping over and upside down. Since we did not have helmets, people clung on to for avoidance of their head cracking apart, even though that definitely wouldn’t happen. In the middle, people were allowed to come off and help other people even though we didn’t know how to help them most of the time. At the end, I was thinking how do people make things look so easy? Especially this one! 

I learned A LOT of things. Not a lot but A LOT as in A LOT LOT (basically very very much). I have a feeling that other people in the grade also learned A LOT that maybe we could even win a prize for “grade that has learned the most things in 24 hours”. I’m going to name three so that this blog post isn’t 1,000,000,000,000 pages long (I even doubt that all that I learned isn’t that long but I guess it would still be very long). First, I learned that YOU NEED PATIENCE, it is very important because you can never get anything done by rushing. For example, if you rushed through the WHOLE ENTIRE ropes course, by the time you come back, you will be bruised and scratched, a sprained ankle and maybe even a broken leg! Second thing is you should encourage your teammates so they will feel more confident (it did not happen with me but I saw my teammates feel good about themselves so I encouraged people a few times though I regret not doing it a lot). Third thing is to find a strategy, like, if you fall off it’s ok just remember what you did wrong and don’t or, if not possible, try not to do it again. Also remember to think of new ways if you tried something over and over again and it did not work.

So my time was actually pretty enjoyable (except for that part we don’t talk about), I learned A LOT of things as I said and my team got through the challenges pretty good, but there were parts it was still very challenging. Maybe you can go there and try to come up with better strategies.                                        (some pictures are not my group)

Home of the Brave Reflection

Other times in literature, the characters have lived happy times and small problems. Well, Kek, the main character of Home of the Brave, written by Katherine Applegate, his life is the exact opposite. His country is in a war and he doesn’t know where his mom is. After he leaves the refugee camp to go to the US, he lives with his aunt and his cousin Ganwar. Read more to find out some of the things Kek is still not used to.

One window for me is Kek is not used to technology since he comes from a country (Sudan) that doesn’t have that much technology. This is a window for me because I have had technology in Turkey even though not as much as in the US but, still, there was technology and Kek didn’t have ANY. I can’t possibly imagine no technology even simple things like light switches and other everyday simple technology things.

One mirror for me is I have moved before like Kek and it is very, very hard  to get used to this new place, new things, and other things you need to get used to still. Like how Kek still didn’t know what snow felt like and thought the trees were dead when they were actually the leaves fell. This is a mirror for me because I have moved before from a country to another country and I know what it feels like to get used to different things that are new to you.

Identity Map Reflection

In 5th Grade, for Social Studies, we made identity maps and Mrs. Cooper hung them up on a bulletin board (well, I think it is one) so everyone can see it. Here are a few pieces of information about me and other three people from the table where I sit.

 I really, really love reading all kinds of books, for example, stories, chapter books, non fiction, and graphic novels and maybe more. My favorite graphic novel series is 5 Worlds (5W1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and my favorite chapter books are Upside – Down Magic series, Whatever After series, Harry Potter series, and Best Wishes series, Front Desk series,  and more, just to name a few series. I just can’t decide. I am also a Chinese person and I am very proud of my culture because I just am (in fact, I love my own culture so much that for Halloween, I’m dressing up as an ancient Chinese person). The book, The Proudest Blue has inspired me to like my own culture even more because the characters have a culture like me and they are also proud of their culture a lot. Something I especially like to do is to play the violin, I just started to practice two hours a day, and I like it because I love classical music so I chose the violin because it would be easier for me since, in Turkey, I learned the piano and another reason is because I love to learn new, interesting things

The three people at my table I decided to write about is Ebrar, Suhana, and Nina. Ebrar says she is a cat lover because she thinks kittens are cute and fluffy. 

Suhana says she is an ice skater because she said when she was five she tried it and she liked it. Nina says she is a gymnast because it is her favorite sport to play.

I think that this will get us to know each other because our identities are about us and our identities can express us more about ourselves and get to know each other in our classroom community. Do you agree or disagree and have another reason?

First Few Weeks of 5th Grade

Ever since the moment I first stepped into the classroom, I realized fifth grade was amazing, not as scary and as stressful as I thought. We got to do many nice (and challenging) things like the Four Fours Challenge and the True or False game about Mrs. Cooper (not that the questions are challenging, the smartboard was giving everyone a hard time and it was challenging handling it).

So far, I really liked everything we did but my favorite was the identity chart, the locker sign, and the We Make a Difference portraits and quotes because the portraits required creativity and imagination to how I draw and describe myself, for the identity chart I needed to express my identity myself a lot and and for the locker sign I just chose one thing I love a lot and drew whatever I wanted that I knew I would still for the rest of the year.

I’m REALLY looking forward to the Halloween party because to me it seems like 5th grade privilege because when Zoe, my friend, and I saw it, our eyes popped out of our heads since you probably don’t get a Halloween Party in other grades (maybe kindergarten, I have no idea). Another thing I can’t wait for is the Hot Dog Field Day because I’m wondering if I will get to taste a hot dog for the first time and I normally still like field days, so basically, I’m really looking forward to these things.

So, 5th grade is very enjoyable in my opinion, and I do hope I will continue to enjoy the rest of 5th grade throughout the school year and on and on and on.